Daily Brief
SEP 3
One week ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told us that military action would take a back seat as sanctions moved into the driver’s seat. Then the United States launched one of its largest salvos of the war, striking close to 100 targets—including two oil tankers—and unveiled its tanker-for-tanker policy. We still have no information indicating that Russian to Iran weapons cargo corridor through the Caspian sea has been targeted.
Now, reports suggest that Trump may simply declare some form of victory and announce that the war is over. In reality, that would amount to a tactical pause: stop or slow the war before the midterms, then restart it after the ballots have been cast.
That is the thing about large wars. Starting them is easy. Getting out is not.
It is the trap that pulled Putin deeper and deeper into Ukraine. More than four years later, he is still at it. Russia’s National Wealth Fund is running dry. The Kremlin is selling gold. Kyiv is still being bombed, but Moscow and St. Petersburg are now being hit as well. Russia’s financial system is struggling to absorb the debt required to keep the war running.
For six weeks, the Finance Ministry suspended its bond auctions because buyers were demanding too much to absorb the risk. The pressure became so severe that Moscow simply stopped putting the auctions through.
Yesterday, it finally completed one.
But no, the market did not return to normal.
The Russian state constructed a financing loop to push the auction across the line. One day before the sale, the Central Bank increased the money available to Russian banks through its weekly repo operation by ₽940 billion. The following day, the Finance Ministry raised ₽938.9 billion from those banks through the bond auction. The new bonds can now be pledged back to the Central Bank in later repo transactions to obtain still more funding.
The numbers are almost identical. The timing is exact. The Central Bank supplied the banks with the liquidity, the banks used their balance sheets to absorb the Finance Ministry’s debt, and the Finance Ministry walked away with nearly ₽939 billion to finance the budget.
That is what four years of war have done to the Russian economy.
But that is not the point we are trying to make. The point is that even under this pressure, the Kremlin still cannot bring itself to withdraw. The gang that started the war knows that leaving now would be recognised for what it is: defeat. So it keeps telling itself that one more offensive, one more mobilisation and one more year might somehow change the result—digging the hole deeper with every attempt.
That is what happens when you grab a tiger by the tail. At some point, you realise you have no idea how to let go. Letting go is scary as hell, so instead you tighten your grip—harder and harder—even as the tiger drags you deeper into danger.
There was a period when Trump still had an exit. He could have stopped the war, declared victory and relied on his billionaire-owned algorithmic platforms to massage the outcome. The bullshit mountain could have programmed the audience, while an army of dollar focused podcasters repeated the same story until surrender sounded like triumph. Maybe—just maybe—he could have walked away with enough of the illusion intact.
But six months into the war, with his approval rating at rock bottom, that exit has vanished into thin air. Trump is now caught in the same trap: unable to win, but politically unable to admit that the war has failed.
A stop-start war therefore looks like the most likely direction from here—slow it before the midterms, call the pause victory, and resume it once the ballots have been cast.
Meanwhile, as Trump struggles to find a way out, Ukraine continues to pose tactical questions that Russia cannot answer. It has been three months since Ukraine’s southern air war moved into its next phase in May, and Russian commanders are still struggling to adapt. Now Kyiv is asking another deeply uncomfortable question around the Kinburn Spit.
Kinburn is a long, narrow finger of land extending west from Russian-occupied Kherson, with the Black Sea on one side and the Dnipro-Bug estuary on the other. Its western tip sits opposite Ochakiv and beside the maritime entrance to the ports of Mykolaiv and Kherson. Whoever controls Kinburn can threaten ships entering the estuary, obstruct port traffic and strike communities along the Mykolaiv coast. That is what makes this narrow strip so valuable.
Ukrainian forces now hold fire dominance over the western and northern portions of the Kinburn Peninsula. Russian troops have reportedly withdrawn from the most exposed positions and concentrated farther east, in forests, prepared shelters and settlements deeper inside the peninsula.
Ukraine is attacking the principal logistics route running from Zaliznyi Port through Heroiske and westward onto Kinburn. FPV drones, bomber drones and remotely laid mines are targeting cars, motorcycles, quad bikes and supply vehicles carrying ammunition, fuel and food.
Ukrainian military sources estimate that approximately 2,500 Russian personnel remain across the wider Kinburn Peninsula. But this is not the same kind of trap developing around the Zelena Dolyna pocket near Lyman. There, Ukraine is pressing Russian forces from three directions, while the Zherebets River leaves them dependent on a single bridge for their escape.
Kinburn is not a sealed encirclement. Russia still has a land route east through Heroiske into occupied Kherson. Ukraine is instead making that route increasingly dangerous and expensive to use. In this case, the “trap” is a narrow peninsula under persistent Ukrainian surveillance and fire—not a pocket whose final exit has already been closed.
There is, however, very little chance—and even less reason—for Ukraine to attempt an amphibious landing and take physical control of Kinburn. There is simply no need to introduce that complication.
Take a look at this image from UAControlMap. Each red dot scattered across Crimea marks a location where an explosion has been documented. The dots now cover practically the entire peninsula. That shows just how widely—and how deeply—Ukrainiandrones and missiles can reach inside Crimea.
Russia is also struggling to move cargo from ports in the Sea of Azov to Black Sea ports and then through the Bosphorus to international markets. Ukraine is already imposing costs across the entire southern theatre without having to occupy every strip of land from which those costs are being imposed.
Why on earth would Ukraine interrupt that strategy and send troops onto Kinburn? Capturing the strip would be only the beginning. Ukraine would then have to defend, feed and supply those troops across the water. Any landing would trigger an intense Russian effort to retake the peninsula, turning what is currently a Russian logistics problem into a Ukrainian one. There would be a considerable price to pay.
Perhaps an amphibious operation at Kinburn would make sense later, when Ukrainian forces are approaching the northern entrance to Crimea and opening another axis would serve a larger campaign.
Right now, absolutely not.
For now, Ukraine should paradoxically want Russia to keep feeding the approximately 2,500 troops stationed across the wider Kinburn Peninsula—and to keep replacing their losses. Every supply vehicle, fuel shipment and replacement sent into that narrow kill zone becomes another target. Let Russia carry the burden of sustaining the force while Ukraine continues dismantling it from a distance.
Across Crimea, the Sea of Azov and southern Ukraine more broadly, Ukraine needs to do just one thing: keep doing what it is already doing. It can increase the volume, but there is no reason to change the strategy.
© 2026 The Concis
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I want my work to define me, not my past.
The fight for Europe and Canada will define our generation. The oligarchs want to tear it apart; the bloc represents everything they despise. Protecting it is crucial—not just for us, but for our children and future generations. Billionaires will back right-wing movements across Europe. They got their start with Brexit.
Let’s make it harder for them by exposing their true intentions.
Shankar Narayan
Garry Kasparov :
Dividing up Ukraine. Dividing up Ukrainians. Dividing up children. That’s what “doing pretty well with Russia” means. No concessions from Putin, occupation for Ukraine, more war to come for Europe. Trump surrendered to Russia on day one, the rest is paperwork to him.
Joe Thomas :
Trump: “We’ve got a lot of stupid people in this country running things.”
Finally, we agree on something.
Volodymyr Yermolenko from UkraineWorld and PEN Ukraine :
Russia wants to turn Ukraine into a concentration camp. Into one vast prison.
The principle of the concentration camp is relentless pressure. You are given not a single minute for yourself, for your own world, for your own thoughts. Constant, grinding pressure. They take away your ability to switch off. You cannot sleep. You cannot dream. You cannot think. You cannot simply be alone with yourself. They take you away from you. All that remains is the shell.
This is what Russia is now trying to do with Ukraine with these endless missile and drone strikes, with its endless air raid alerts which never stop.
Broken people have no inner core, no will of their own. They become automatons. Robots.
While the world is creating an artificial humanity by rapidly expanding intellectual capacities through artificial intelligence, Russia has spent centuries creating its own artificial humanity through the slow degradation of the intellectual, emotional, and volitional capacities of people who already exist.
While the world is trying to turn robots into human beings, Russia has spent centuries trying to turn human beings into robots.
Now it wants to tell us: you are in prison, and we are your guards. We will watch you, punish you, kill you. But most importantly, we will strip you of your intelligence, your feelings, and your will.
The empire’s method is simple: drain people of their intelligence, their feelings, and their will—and then you can do whatever you want with them. This is what has been done to much of Russia’s own population. And this is what Russia wants to do to us.
The inner resistance to this is equally simple: to preserve an intelligence of your own, feelings of your own, a will of your own. In other words, to have a culture of your own, a society of your own, and a state of your own.
This is what resilience means.
For God’s sake, someone get these words of Volodymyr into the hands of someone sensible who can make decisions.
Sadly, I don’t know of any people in the US admin who care. Did you hear Bessett the US Treasury Secretary said Ukraine is responsible for driving fuel prices up? What a piece of scum suckin MOFO POS. Someone should tell this subhuman that Ukraine was attacked and all Ukraine is doing is enforcing the so called sanctions the world imposed. So Bassett hear this loud and clear F**k you. I pray these maga pieces of shit die a horrible death, ASAP.
As I often observe, to get a top job with Krasnov, you need a) to have a poisonous hatred of Ukraine, b) to be a putler-rimmer and c) to be a total cunt.
Outstanding comment. 👍✌️